I like reading autobiographies. My favorites are one about relatively obscure people who did something amazing and enjoyed some brief fame which has since been forgotten in the annals of history. Currently, for example, I’m reading one about the pilot who made the first trip by airplane from London to Australia in about 1922.
But what always amazes me in these books is the level of detail that many of them seem to recall. Some of these books were written decades after the event. I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday. Do these authors take notes while they’re doing whatever it is, just in case they decide to write an autobiography some day? Sure, they might have pictures, or a journal to jog their memory. But many of the details are from before whatever their big event was - details about their childhood and that kind of thing.
Is it largely fictional in many cases? I don’t really mean “fictional”, but perhaps at least only representative of the truth? (There’s a word for that that’s escaping me right now.) Like movies that are “based on a true story”?
Some autobiographies has extensive dialog between the author and other people. I assume this is almost always completely made-up, though representative of what really happened. I suppose with more famous people at big events they would have transcripts, recordings and detailed notes to refer to, but not so with lesser events or less famous people.
Has anyone here written an autobiography? I’d be fascinated to learn about the process.
I have extensive memories of some events from my childhood. Other events, my mom or sister or other family members have extensive memories of. Yet other events, I have no memory at all of.
If I were writing an autobiography, guess which events I would include?
Writing about what you had lunch each day would not be a particularly interesting autobiography. Autobiographies nowadays, of course, are “written” by celebrities and their ghostwriters, so there can be a lot of pure fiction. However, when the subject writes his own biography himself, then they are putting down what they do remember. Since they’re covering important things in their lives, they remember it well, and they can pick out incidents as needed.
I’m sure if you sat down and thought about it, and maybe started writing an outline, you would remember a lot more of your past than you think you do. And like Chronos suggested, you’d call your friends and family members if you were fuzzy on some details.
We did a lot of talking with my grandpa about “the old days” before he died. We asked specific questions about music and sports and toys and WWII. I’m sure it was stuff he hadn’t thought of in dozens of years but when prompted, he could talk about almost anything at length. I bet you could too.
Many people used to keep journals, which can be consulted when writing, and you could look up information about events you remember. However autobiographies are not necessarily 100% factual. In junior high we had an assignment to read an autobiography and a biography of the same person. That is highly instructive. The choice of what to write about, and the spin put on events may vary a lot from what really happened. Plus, people who write memoirs (partial autobiographies for non-famous people) are encouraged to make it a story by selective memory.
Although the age of people who publish autobiographies is getting younger, many write them when they are considerably older or ‘past their prime’. This is significant because life was probably very different in their younger years, which allows the author to compare events that happened in the past to their current lives. Perhaps their memory of specific events may not be completely accurate, but have you noticed how older people are usually very good at creating a ‘mood’ of what life was like for them growing up? I think that’s because they have modern life to compare it to.
I have an extremely uninteresting life, but I’m certain I could fill a book with my recollections. Maybe it helps if your life is broken down in stages:
Memories of Scotland
Memories of Northern Ireland just prior to “the troubles” explosion
Moving to Canada
Adjusting to a new culture and friends
Moving to the north end of the city
Moving back to the south end of the city
College
First real full time job 400 miles away from home
Plant closure and the move to Ottawa
Wild roommates and our escapades
My own place
Moving in with someone
Buying a house
Marriage
Kids
Change of employment location X 3
Recession
Out of work
Finally a new job in a different field
Separation
Now WTF?
I could fill volumes of pages with no trouble, but my memory for the past has always been good. Yesterday’s lunch could still be a problem though.
You’re making a huge assumption–that the people who are credited with the autobiography actually wrote the book. Often the cowriter (credited or not) really wrote the book and the celebrity just signed off on it. Check out this WSJ article on ghostwriters.
It depends. Isaac Asimov, who wrote several volumes of autobiography, wrote extensive diary entries nearly every day of his life, so he had a wealth of material to work from.
Most people, however, don’t keep diaries, especially before they become “famous” or close to it. Nevertheless, people are constantly recounting day-to-day experiences to others, and as they do so, they emphasize some things, omit others, and many people simply fabricate details they think will make the recounting more interesting or meaningful. Narrating (and more importantly, re-narrating) our lives is not so much a presentation of “facts” but our interpretation of our experience. The more we do this, the more we “remember” things that may or may not have actually happened they way we tell it. For those autobiographies that are actually written by the subject, this comprises a lot of the detail that surprises the OP.
I wrote one, and one of my motivations was that in conversations with other people I became aware that I had better specific recollections of my life than most folks appeared to. That wasn’t the only motivation, of course, but it was a factor. I’m the same person I was when I was 8 and other people don’t seem to feel that sense of continuity with themselves and don’t remember being 8 except for little fragments.
Process: in a plain text file, I’d start making notes of everything I could remember from where I last left off to some cutoff point beyond that that divided my life cleanly in such a way that, for any given memory, I’d most likely know if it came from the earlier context than from the later context. (For a major example, moving from Georgia to New Mexico; for a minor example, transitioning from 2nd grade to 3rd grade; almost any memory seems to be anchored by where I lived at the time; most memories involving things that happened at school are anchored by a sense of whose classroom I was in and what grade I was in). Anyway, then I’d switch to the other plain text file and just write the thing. Just like composing a post here except that I come back later and take up where I left off and keep going.
After it was all done, it was time proofread it and I cleaned up murky passages, got some friends to read and comment; and then for the second cleanup pass I divided it up into chapters and pasted each chapter into the word processor, formatted it, used the spell checker, and produced final chapter files.
It also helps if you dig up old photos of the past to jog your memory (not just your own photos, but public photos of an area, your neighborhood from the time, pictures of old buses that ran down your street, whatever). You can supplement your memory by reading other contemporaneous accounts and news stories from the time, etc. You can also interview the other people who were there and see how their recollections match or differ from yours.
That last can be quite enlightening. We all have memories that are part real, part construct. Sometimes a thing that you remember happening to one person actually happened to another, or was conflated with another event that happened much earlier or later. Memory is a tricky thing, so even if you’re trying to be perfectly honest you may have a very distorted view of your own past. Take that into consideration when reading someone else’s biography.
And if the biography includes details like what kind of sandwich a person ate 20 years ago on a specific day, I would be very suspicious that many of those kinds of irrelevant details are filled in from general memory and not necessarily accurate. Some autobiographies have so much of that tiny detail that you have to assume that either the author kept a detailed diary at the time, or he’s filling in ‘color’ details that aren’t necessarily true. Hopefully he or she wouldn’t do that with a detail that actually mattered.
Their relatives, but as my generation told the prior one after my uncle’s childhood memoirs got published “hey, it may not be accurate but it is well-told!” The things told did happen, but he often attributed them to the wrong person or gave the wrong date, to the point where a few events actually took place before he was born (that uncle is the fourth of five children).
Most autobiographies I’ve read don’t tell the complete story of the person’s life. Rather, they focus on a narrative thread that captures the most exciting incidents. These are naturally periods of high emotion and stress, so your brain remembers them very clearly. I don’t think I’ve ever read historical or biographical book that gave equal “weight” to every moment. They skip the boring parts, just like your brain does.
Autobiographies are, by necessity, “paraphrased”. Often, there will be part in quotation marks, which probably are not faithful to the exact words uttered at the time.
Now that the internet provides me with exact details of all MLB baseball games played during my lifetime,. I have often discovered that I misremembered some details that I was sure of. Hank Sauer hit three homers in one game off Curt Simmons, but I could have sworn it was Robin Roberts. I also remembered that they were the Cubs’ only three hits of the game, and all came leading off an inning, but that was not true, either. So I now place much less reliance on memories that I was “certain” of.
I consider my own memory lapses to be typical, and when reading anyone else’s account, I am conscious of the likelihood of errors, even if the autobiographer is being as honest as he can. I also know that there are things in my past life that I would never admit to in a million years, even though revealing them would disclose quite a lot of insight about me that an autobiography is supposed to shed light on.